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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

2014

Various contracts will hit 2014 and start making sense to cut, if the performance isn’t up to value.

The below all assume that these players make it through 2013 without renegotiation or restructure, and are on the team for ’13 (i.e., the 2014 bonus proration counts against 2014, no matter what). It also assumes that none of them would be cut as June-style cuts this year, and all of the potential cuts are treated as standard for 2014 as well. Otherwise, you could just save the entire salary, and that future proration just counts the following year for more savings.

Examples:
*Charles Godfrey – ’14 salary/roster bonus, $5.1 mil. $2.1 million in guarantees count for ’14 if he makes it through this year, regardless; there’s $3 million in guarantees from ’15-16 that would still be out there. Net savings would be $2 million, enough to use to replace him as necessary.

*Jon Beason – ’14 salary, $6.75 million with workout bonus. $4 million, the 2015 bonus proration, is still unaccounted, so if Beason were cut, the savings is still $2.75 million.

*Deangelo Williams - $6 million ’14 salary with workout bonus. His contract ends after 2015, so $3.2 million would accelerate from that year; that’s a savings of $2.8 million.

*Thomas Davis – his ’14 salary escalates to $2.75 million. He pushed a signing bonus back to that year ($2.5 million), which wouldn’t count if cut. He has $1.4 million of future (2015) proration that would count if cut, so he’d save $1.35 million. Similarly, James Anderson goes from a net $200,000 to cut this year, to a $2.6 million savings, if you prefer.

So just from a canvas of deals that are tough to deal with this year, and easy to deal with next, there’s $11.6 million that you could cut. That’s not a full picture, just a couple of contracts I picked out that could be a lot easier to deal with. Greg Olsen, among others, would be a lot more pliable. I assume that, one way or another, Chris Gamble and Jordan Gross’ current contracts are dealt with before then.

It’s also the final year of Cam Newton’s rookie deal, in which the team has a 5th year (2015) option that would pay him equal to the franchise amount for a QB.

In each case, it would be prohibitive to cut the player in 2013 – it would cost more to cut than to keep. It’s interesting all of these contracts were setup that way , in what would’ve been directly after Ron Rivera’s third season (generally, with a year left, a coach has either earned a new contract, or earned his release by then). So, I don’t know if it was just the way things set up given that most of these contracts were 2011, or if there was some concerted effort to have a line drawn in the sand for that season. But, if he can get through ’13, Dave Gettleman has a lot of options for the year after.